Of the Greek republics, which have again and again risen to greatness and fallen into insignificance, it is not difficult to speak, whether we recount their past history or venture an opinion on their future.

What kind of use of ὅσα is this? It seems to be functioning as a relative pronoun, but is there a Smyth number? Or am I missing some sort of fancy attraction, dropping of antecedent, etc.?

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by pster on Sun Jan 20, 2013 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Of the Greek republics, which have again and again risen to greatness and fallen into insignificance, it is not difficult to speak, whether we recount their past history or venture an opinion on their future.

What kind of use of ὅσα is this? It seems to be functioning as a relative pronoun, but is there a Smyth number? Or am I missing some sort of fancy attraction, dropping of antecedent, etc.?

Thanks in advance.

I know that ὅσα is strictly a quantitive relative pronoun and that its antecendent is often omitted.Its meaning is generally "as many as.. = all those who..."

However, I don't understand the meaning of συμβαίνει here. You've read it as impersonal which is finebut how did it become "to speak" or "to describe" as another version reads it?

Here is one of the things I am struggling with. Consider a basic relative pronoun. It has an antecedent. That antecedent is some kind of noun. Sometimes it is a demonstrative. And sometimes, as with attraction, that demonstrative can drop out.

Now when we get to these osos, oios relative pronouns, I assume it is the same thing. They have antecedents. Sometimes those antecedents are not the correlative demonstratives. Sometimes they are. And sometimes they are correlative demonstratives that are implicit/have dropped out (I guess through attraction??).

Is that story correct?

And if it is correct, what is happening in this passage from Polybius. What exactly is the antecedent for this relative?

I don't want to prejudge matters. I think most people would instinctively say it is a relative. So what is the antecedent that provides its referent? Nate seems to suggest that the antecedent has been omitted. If we go that route, then if we unomit it, what do we get? And what allowed us to omit it. Some kind of attraction process? If we don't think the antecedent has been omitted, then it must be somewhere in the sentence. What is it? Or maybe one thinks it needs no antecedent. OK, then how does that work?

'And then at last the whole Athenian army was in flight; and with difficulty, and following many different routes through the mountains, all those who were left, and who had not been killed either on the spot in close combat, or by the Chalcidian cavalry and the peltasts, got away to Eion.'

In the meantime, here are my criteria for a full understanding of a use of osos which I present with the reasons behind said criteria:

osos is an adjective. So:

1) One must be able to say what noun it is modifying, or one must say that it is being used substantively.

osos is a relative. As such, it must be Janus faced, looking "back" to some antecedent and "forward" to some what I'll call "relative content", "RC" for short. I put "back" and "forward" in scare quotes because sometimes the antecedent comes after. Moreover, the antecedent is strictly speaking adjectival.

2) One must be able to identify an adjectival antecedent.

3) One must be able to identify the RC.

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Here's an English example:

I bought him some beers, as many beers as he wanted.

"osos____" is equivalent to "as many____as".

1) Our relative adjective is modifying the second "beers".

2) The adjectival antecedent is "some".

3) And the RC is roughly "he wanted ____ beers "

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When I try and apply these criteria, criteria that come from our basic understandings of what it is to be an adjective, a relative, and you can even throw in the process of substantialization of adjectives, I get lost.

1) Our relative adjective is modifying an implied "men" directly following it, or it has itself been substaintialized. Numbers slip back and forth between nouns and adjectives more than any other kind of word.

2) The adjectival antecedent is an implied (adjectival) number modifying λοιποὶ. Note that the antecedent follows.

'With regard to all that the two sides said in speeches, either when they were on the verge of war, or when they were actually in conflict, remembering the exact terms of what was spoken was difficult, both for me, in the case of the speeches which I heard myself, and for those who reported them to me from elsewhere; ...'

Here I would claim that we are to imagine an implicit antecedent in front of γυναικείας. Yes, I know, we would have to change it from the abstract adjectival feminine to plural substantial women. But that doesn't phase me in the least. I think at the heart of the meaning and sense that is what is happening.

If it is necessary for me to remark somewhat of feminine virtue, as many as are now widows...

If it is necessary for me to remark somewhat of so many virtuous women, as many as are now widows...

The syntax needs to be massaged, but the sense and meaning point to a clear antecedent. If they didn't, or so I claim, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

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I will put up a comment about the Thucydides passage you mention in an hour or two.

So, I think Cameron is clearly right. Otherwise, I would have no idea what the referent was. If I were to give you an English translation, I wouldn't know whether to emphasize the numerical aspects or minimize them. But I would claim that for an ancient Greek, ὅσα always carried a numerical signifcance. In this case it is the number of words spoken, or the number of speeches given.

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Since we are here, can you give me a gloss for τοῖς ἄλλοθέν ποθεν?

Is this a case where there we have to supply the substantive ourselves? In which case it would be "others"?

pster wrote:So, I think Cameron is clearly right. Otherwise, I would have no idea what the referent was. If I were to give you an English translation, I wouldn't know whether to emphasize the numerical aspects or minimize them. But I would claim that for an ancient Greek, ὅσα always carried a numerical signifcance. In this case it is the number of words spoken, or the number of speeches given.

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Since we are here, can you give me a gloss for τοῖς ἄλλοθέν ποθεν?

Is this a case where there we have to supply the substantive ourselves? In which case it would be "others"?

Thanks for the explanation.

Re your query, my understanding is that the parsing is τοῖς ἀπαγγέλλουσιν [participle] ἐμοὶ ἄλλοθέν ποθεν, 'for those reporting <them> to me from other places'.

Hi, pster. I think you've got your answer with IreneY's reply. Instead of using an antecedent in nominative -- weather it be τὰ πολιτεύματα ὅσα... or inside the relative clause itself as in his reply -- Polybius chose to use a partitive genitive: τῶν μὲν γὰρ Ἑλληνικῶν πολιτευμάτων ὅσα...

I don't think there is anything else to it.

Last edited by NateD26 on Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hey Nate, thanks for chiming in. I just got back and so will get into it after making my coffee. But I rejected the partitive genitive idea because he's talking about all of the Greek states, not just some of them. More in a bit.

pster wrote:And don't you think that the genitive of πολιτευμάτων is governed by the end of the sentence τὴν ὑπὲρ τῶν προγεγονότων ἐξήγησιν καὶ τὴν ὑπὲρ τοῦ μέλλοντος ἀπόφασιν?

pster - couldn't the end of the sentence relate to ὅσα as an accusative of respect ('in respect of those Hellenic cities ...'), rather than to the genitive τῶν μὲν γὰρ Ἑλληνικῶν πολιτευμάτων, which I too have been taking with ὅσα? Are you positing the genitive as a sort of genitive of connection or respect? I don't know enough to be sure whether or not that is feasible/likely.

You can have a partitive genitive as the whole group and then divide it to its separate subgroups with μέν..δέ as is the case here. John's suggestion of reading this accusative as that of respectis supported by the extant translations, this one among them.

Nate seems to say it is a partitive genitive. I don't see any part/whole relationship to support this. The ones that rise and fall aren't a part of the Greek republics, they are the whole.

You are suggesting that an accusative of respect is in play. We have two accusatives, osa and narration, and one genitive, of-the-republics. But the accusative has to be the thing that follows the "in respect to" phrase. You have put the genitive there, so I don't follow. By the end of the sentence, I basically mean "the narration".

I am struck by a couple of things.

1) There are a huge number of adverbial uses listed in LSJ, many of them temporal.

2) osa has a quantitative character. It's not just a relative. So as I detailed above, one needs to specify the antecedent. (It would also be nice to specify exactly what it is modifying! again as I detailed above.)

3) In so far as I grasp the context, Polybius seems to be saying that every Greek republic that rose, fell.

The Perseus translation brings out both items 2) and 3): "Of the Greek republics, which have again and again risen to greatness and fallen into insignificance..." So, we are talking about the whole bunch of them, and all of them rise and all of them fall. (For Rome it's not so easy to discuss the pros and cons of its constitution, because it is still growing.) So here we see the antecedent for osa, it is in front of the second polakis. osa, or so I claim, is being used to equate the rises and falls. It's not just a relative. I haven't found a single instance where there isn't some implicit linking going on. Here the linking is rises and falls. They are equal in number. So, I would translate it:

Of the Greek republics, as often as they have risen, so often have they fallen, it happens that the narration be easy...

Now the intersting issues left, as I see it, are:

a) Should we just take the osa phrase as parenthetical?

b) Since it seems to be giving the reason for the ease of narration, it would be nice if we could imagine an implicit connective, e.g., a "since as often as..." Is there precedence for that?

c) Can we find some other interesting adverbial cases of osa with polakis? That would cement my view that what we have here is an adverb multiplying an adverb.

d) If we don't find other similar uses, can we rework osa to link the force of the fact of many rises and falls with the force of the ease. See LSJ for adverbial uses along the lines of "as far as". This has the advantage of solving the connective problem. "Of the Greek republics, as far as they have often risen and often fallen, so far it happens that the narration be easy..."

To draw my line in the sand one more time: authors don't use osa when a simple relative pronoun will do. It is a relative adjective/adverb and it links two quantities!! If you disagree, show me an example. I don't know of any! The only exceptions are a few frozen idioms and maybe a few odd ones in Homer.)

Last edited by pster on Fri Jan 18, 2013 7:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nate, as I just said, the μέν..δέ cases are the same cases. μέν..δέ just distinguish the rises and falls. Same republics. We don't have one the one hand rising republics and on the other hand falling republics. We have republics that rise and then the same republics fall.

pster wrote:Nate, as I just said, the μέν..δέ cases are the same cases. μέν..δέ just distinguish the rises and falls. Same republics. We don't have one the one hand rising republics and on the other hand falling republics. We have republics that rise and then the same republics fall.

I stand corrected and I'll grant you that he is referring to the same group.What is this genitive then? What is its function in this sentence? Is it a simple possessivegoverned by ὅσα or is it governed by one of the accusatives in the dependent statement?

pster wrote:I assume that it is just governed by ἐξήγησιν and ἀπόφασιν in parallel.

But - and this is the point I had in mind - is 'an account of the cities'/'an opinion of the cities' an acceptable use of the genitive? It's not really possessive or partitive, so what kind of genitive would it be?

Just recently I have begun to wonder about the classifications of types of cases--genitive of blah, dative of such and such, accusative of what cha ma call it--the putting of every instance into one of n boxes. Sure, we can try and do that. And it is important to try and do that.

But on the other hand, each noun, each adjective, etc is going to have particular usages specified in LSJ. I haven't seen anybody prove or even claim that every such usage in LSJ falls into one of the n boxes.

So when we get a word like ἐξήγησις and we see that it takes the genitive to specify the content, that satisfies me now. If somebody can prove that there is some exhaustive list of n boxes, then maybe I'll try and verify that every time I find a usage that I am interested in in LSJ that it indeed falls into one of the n boxes.

I've been more guilty of this probably than anybody and like I say it is only recently that I have had a change of heart and I am glad you asked the question, but I am going to avoid answering it for the moment. Maybe in an hour I'll have a change of heart. But until I am done cooking my chicken and eating it, I will be satisfied with LSJ.

Last edited by pster on Fri Jan 18, 2013 9:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.